“It’s important to look around. Especially if you’re in a rural area, or a wild land area, or have cottages or cabins in the wild land area,: says Hansen. “ It’s dry, and it’s brown out there, so people sometimes presume that because the soil is still wet from the snow melt that we won’t have a wildfire.

“But in fact, it’s those fine fuels, the grasses, leaves, and so on that can dry out very quickly. We call them one-hour fuels, because if we have a breeze and a nice, warm sunny day, that vegetation can dry out within an hour, and it can combust.”

The climatic conditions, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, show that we probably will have a worse wildfire season than usual this spring, according to Hansen. On average, there are roughly 8,000 – 10,000 a wildfires per year in Michigan, about half of those in the southern part of the state.

“One of the things that we really encourage people to do is keep the leaves out from underneath their deck, out from around their bushes, out of their eaves troughs,” Hansen says. “Even though they might not have a fire right next to the home, we are having wildfires this time of year.

“We have an item we call ‘fire brands,’ which is really a burning ember, and if you’ve had campfires you’ve seen these sparks fly up out of the fire. That’s a fire brand. Except, when we get a wildfire going, we can have larger fire brands flying up in the air, they can land under decks, in these leaves, in the eaves troughs, and they can start a fire, which then could ignite the house.”

“We caution everyone in this publication that any plant will burn,” Hansen says. “So it’s important to keep them watered, as well as your lawn, and that will create a buffer around your home,” said Hansen.

Hansen also suggests other prevention strategies, such as pruning trees from the bottom. Hansen refers to the bottom branches as ladder fuels, or brush that act as a ladder for wildfire to spread up into the canopy of trees.